As Michael Kades writes, “the stakes are much higher than an ideological battle or technical adjustments to a legal regime” here. We need to understand how anti-trust practice affects the degree of monopoly in the United States and Hal monopoly effects equitable growth and societal well being. We do not. I think that attempting to understand these two issues is the most important analytic issue for policy relevant economic research in the United States today: Michael Kades: Why market competition matters to equitable growth: "At first glance, competition in the U.S. economy may seem far afield of the topic of equitable growth.... What could antitrust enforcement have to do with maintaining a healthy economy?...
...By the late 1960s and 1970s... a new critique, born at the University of Chicago... antitrust enforcement as more likely to be the problem than the solution... concluded that most mergers were efficient and beneficial... theorized that anticompetitive conduct was unlikely to work... [and] anticompetitive effects were likely transient. Much ink has been spilled about the actual impact of the Chicago School on antitrust enforcement. It has faced significant criticisms within the antitrust community, but even those critics agreed with many of its principles....
Courts—sometimes over the objection of government enforcers, as with the California Dental and American Express decisions, for example—continued their rightward turn. More importantly, new research questions how competitive the economy actually is. Labor economists have documented the pervasiveness of monopsony.... There is increasing evidence that mark-ups and corporate profits are growing and are persistent. Firms are not just earning higher profits; they are also more likely to maintain that profitability over time.... The benefits of competition are broad, and research increasingly shows that the elimination of competition can contribute to... raises [in] the cost of living... to economic inequality... [to] wage stagnation... [to] suppressing innovation and stifling entrepreneurship, which is at a historical low....
No consensus has developed about whether the U.S. economy suffers from a monopoly problem. If there is a monopoly problem... it is worth asking to what degree competition policy in general—and the antitrust laws in particular—are responsible.... Equitable Growth has been participating in this discussion for some time.... There are three related questions for competition policy in the United States today:
- Is monopoly power prevalent in the U.S. economy?
- If the answer to the first question is yes, then to what extent is lax antitrust doctrine responsible for the existence of monopoly power?
- If the answer to the second question is to a significant extent, then what are the solutions to failures in antitrust doctrine in particular and competition policy more generally?...
The stakes are much higher than an ideological battle or technical adjustments to a legal regime...
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